I’ve an awful fear of Johnny Grealish, who sits with his back against the obelisk monument in Glenbruff. He’s a horrible thing: a mound of crumpled brown clothing, and only the one ear and the one arm. He roars at everyone, no matter their age or circumstance, and furiously thrashes his stump in the air. He has a turkey’s neck and a swollen face with a maze of violet veins across the midst of it. His teeth are bonded with plaque. You have the sense that he has a sort of a wizened monkey’s body beneath his coat, all downy skin and bone. Evelyn says he shares a bed with his mother, and that he baits badgers and eats them, but there are a hundred and one rumours about him, and we don’t really know which of them is true. He’s often carted off in the evenings into the box at the back of a tractor. Daddy says he is a ‘dipsomaniac’, and I look it up in the dictionary and find out that ‘dipsomaniac’ is another word for ‘alcoholic’. Mammy says to pay no heed to Johnny Grealish, and to pray for him when I see him. She says he’s had a tragic life, and has every good reason for being a crackpot.
The way I understand it, ladies die in secret, in a hush, and men die making a big fuss. Louise Morley has died from cancer. She’s Mammy’s friend and she’s the mammy of Aidan and Peadar. I’m not allowed to go to funerals because I’m only ten, but Evelyn goes wherever she wants. Evelyn is allowed to go up to the Morleys’ house with her father for the wake, and she says there was Battenberg cake, and the coffin was open and she was able to reach in and touch Louise Morley’s hand, and she said it was warm. She said it looked as though she was only just gone asleep. She said Aidan was bawling and he’d put a handful of primroses from the back garden in beside his mammy, and Peadar was sitting beyond in a corner and wouldn’t budge, and then he went walking around in the fields on his own with Sheba the dog until eleven o’clock at night. There were neighbours out looking for him but he didn’t get in trouble. Evelyn says Peadar is to be kept back a year in school, and himself and Aidan will be in the same class from now on.
The day after the wake, I’m lying on my tummy on the carpet in my bedroom with Evelyn, and we’re cutting ladies out of the slippery pages of magazines. We’re going to Sellotape them onto the bedroom wall. As I trim the ladies, I’m thinking about Louise Morley. I’m thinking she must be queuing up for a gauzy white gown and a halo and a pair of wings. ‘Mrs Morley must be up in heaven now. God will be meeting her at the gate and she’ll be let straight in.’
Evelyn sits up on her heels. ‘There’s no such thing as God,’ she says nonchalantly.
‘How do you make that out?’ I ask, annoyed with her for saying such a mad, strange thing. You’d have to be soft to think there’s no God. Sure, who else made all the people and the animals and the sun and rain – only God.
‘You can’t see him, you can’t talk to him, you can’t even send him a letter. Sure, anyone with a spark of sense knows there’s no God. There’s no scientific proof.’
‘You don’t need to send God a letter. He can see into your head with his holy powers. It’s not like he’s a person like the rest of us.’
‘All the adults tell us he’s real because they want us to be good,’ she says. ‘But the truth is there’s no one watching. God is only made-up. So you can do whatever you want.’ She’s so casual about it, not forceful at all, that I’m struck with a magnificent terror, the likes of which I’ve never experienced before. If there’s no God, then there’s no heaven, and there’s no pattern to anything, and nothing makes sense.
‘I don’t think all the adults would gang up and tell us such a big lie.’ Who’s to say that Evelyn has all the answers, even if she does watch Sky Television.
‘Adults tell big lies all the time. Why do you think the newspapers are so heavy? They’re full of stories about adults telling lies.’ In my mind’s eye I see Peadar running through the fields, lit up by the moon. What if there’s no one out there minding us and keeping an eye on things? My eyeballs burn hot, and the tears rise up behind them, slipping down my cheeks and steaming my glasses. Evelyn quietens down after that and we busy ourselves with taping up the cut-out ladies. Every time we open or close the bedroom door, they rustle and dance on the wall.
In the evening time, after Evelyn’s gone home, I ask Mammy if there’s any God. A God who made us all and looks after us. She has a long think about it – ‘Mmm, let me think about that now’ – and that alone makes me feel very anxious, and then she says God is inside a person, inside in a person’s heart, and that we all have a bit of God in us. It’s not a real answer. It’s not a lie, I don’t think, because Mammy wouldn’t tell me a lie, but it doesn’t answer the question, and after she’s said it she gives me a closed smile with no teeth.
When you talk to Maeve, it feels as though your words are falling into an infinite black hole. No matter what’s said to her, Maeve laughs, and she’s the sort of a girl who reminds the teacher when she forgets to give us homework. Maeve is an only child, and her adoptive parents, Tom and Mary Lynch, are bordering on elderly. Tom Lynch has a jaundiced-looking face and smells of wood smoke. His cows are miserable and hungry-looking. Mary Lynch is a biddy and wears a headscarf to Mass. She keeps spider plants in stained woollen crochet holders on all the window sills, and there’s a sticky fly catcher suspended above the dinner table, studded with fizzing black flies and long-legged creatures jerking towards a slow death.
Evelyn’s parents have a holiday home in Lanzarote, and she goes there regularly with no warning to myself. In her absence, myself and Maeve are playing in Tom Lynch’s dilapidated timber shed. Tom Lynch’s shed is a scary place, full of milky animal medicines kept in old cough bottles, massive pills for cows and sheep, and glass ampoules strewn loose on the dirt. There’s even a metal bucket with stinking chicken feet sticking out of it. The crows ark-ark-ark in the pine trees beyond.
Maeve’s toys are pure rubbish. Her jigsaw puzzle is soft with damp. Her xylophone has two of the bars missing from it, and her doll has a glued-on wig that rolls away from its forehead. Maeve hasn’t much to say, just whistles away by herself and rocks the doll in her arms. It’s a doll with blinking eyes, but one of the eyes is stuck closed. Maeve’s too old for rocking dolls. I can’t bear Maeve’s presence for too long without having Evelyn to balance things out. Evelyn says it’s fine to pal around with Maeve for now, but she can’t see her ever leaving Glenbruff. Maeve isn’t cut out for the kinds of lives we’re going to lead. She won’t be coming with us in the long run.
‘I’ve to go home, Maeve.’
‘I’ll give you a go of the doll,’ she says, holding it out to me.
‘No, thanks. We’ve visitors at home. I was told not to be gone for long.’ If she knows it’s a lie, she doesn’t let on.
It’s a long stretch until Evelyn returns, as brown as a berry and with coloured embroidery thread wound around a slip of her hair. It’s awfully difficult not to envy her. The furthest I’ve been away is to a caravan park in Cork, where Robert contracted ringworm of the leg.
Evelyn has a television combined with a VHS player in her bedroom, and she can watch television all night if she feels like it. There’s a SodaStream in the kitchen, and we make popcorn without supervision, and no one gives out if we burn the pot. Evelyn’s mother, Alma Cassidy, buys heaps of groceries sometimes, and at other times there’s nothing in the press at all. Alma is forever having a nap upstairs, or listening to her Enya tapes, or walking around with the cordless phone. Herself and Dan have a bad marriage. They married young and used second-hand wedding rings because they hadn’t any money, but they’ve plenty of money now. We always hear the beeep-beeep-beeep from the Cassidy Haulage lorries doing three-point turns in the yard before driving over to France. I often wonder what’d happen if I crept into one of the lorries and fell asleep. Would I end up awakening in an exotic, faraway place? I suppose I’d walk around for an hour and take it all in, and then go searching for a grown-up. I wouldn’t like to have Mammy and Daddy worried sick over my whereabouts.
Evelyn’s younger brother Mickey d
idn’t talk until he was four, and from thereon out he never again shut his gob. He has a small gaunt face with a big red mouth, white-blond hair and eyes the colour of Connemara marble. He often follows us up and around Glenbruff, and he’s always looking for attention. He has no one to play with, and Alma is always tired, and Dan is always in the Portakabin office or in the courthouse in Adragule.
‘Let me come with ye,’ Mickey cries out of his big red mouth.
‘Go home, Mickey. We don’t want you. You’re haunting us,’ Evelyn shouts, but he’s undeterred. We often see his little white face and big red mouth peeping out of bushes at us. You’d want him around like a hole in the head. It’s fair to say that Mickey and Maeve have myself and Evelyn plagued with their presence.
Mammy works as an aide in Saint Fintan’s Psychiatric Hospital, and she cleans the church for twenty pounds a week. She has a bouncy blow dry and wears silk blouses with shoulder pads and Peter Pan collars and a pair of clip-on earrings resembling anchors. Mammy loves us all, but we are the runner-up prize. We represent the broken dream. The dream that has been broken is the pursuit of acting. Mammy had been up in Dublin when she was in her twenties and she’d been in several amateur stage productions: Playboy of the Western World, Dancing at Lughnasa and Juno and the Paycock. She met Daddy at a dance at Christmas time and got engaged to him, and then she had to come down to Glenbruff and close the door on the whole lot.
It’s easy to know what life is like for Daddy. Daddy is happiest when he is fixing up a place and putting it in order. Daddy smells like turpentine and he has black and white hair like a sheepdog and when he’s at home he wears white sneakers stained green from mowing the lawn. He’s the maintenance man at Amperloc, an American pharmaceuticals company on the outskirts of the town, and he goes about planting deciduous shrubs, replacing the filters in air-conditioning units and patching the car park. As well as that, Daddy is the chairman of the Community Improvement Committee, and regularly telephones the county council enquiring about pothole repair, the faulty water scheme and the removal of lead pipes. Daddy believes he can revive Glenbruff, but it seems that each time he turns his back, there’s a stone wall falling down in one place or another. ‘There hasn’t been a house built in Glenbruff in over a year,’ he says, ‘but the graveyard is nearly full. What does that tell you.’ Daddy’s always speculating about Amperloc, fearing they’ll move to a cheaper manufacturing base in the likes of Eastern Europe or Asia. The maintenance budget has taken a hit of fifteen per cent, and according to Daddy, the first sign of a company in difficulty is a cut to the maintenance budget.
Robert thinks he knows better than anyone. He has black hair and big black pupils in his brown eyes and a cleft chin. He has a creaking accordion, and a big book called Bridges of the World, and he uses parchment paper to trace the outlines of well-known bridges. The middle of the book has a pop-up bridge in it. When he’s grown-up, Robert says, he’ll design a special bridge carrying road and rail, and within its structure there’ll be residential and commercial units. This style of bridge, according to himself, will make him a millionaire many times over.
‘The real world isn’t as generous as Desmond Duignan is making out. The real world has hurdles and setbacks and all sorts of interference,’ Mammy tells him, but her words have little effect.
‘That’s what’s known as a “limiting belief”,’ Robert says, cracking his knuckles.
‘You’ve an answer for everything, is that it.’ Mammy worries that the liveliness has been leached out of Robert entirely. His rigid personality has been forged in Principal Duignan’s classroom. When Robert was due to enrol in primary school, the school in Glenbruff was at risk of closure due to insufficient numbers, and so my parents enrolled him at the primary school in Saint Malachy’s Parish, two miles beyond Glenbruff in the direction of Adragule. As Mammy and Daddy signed the enrolment forms, the principal of Saint Malachy’s National School, Mr Desmond Duignan, told them he had all his money made on the stock market. He said he was only teaching so he could give back, and pass on the secrets of success to subsequent generations.
It’s said that Principal Duignan attends a summer-long conference in California every year without fail, the contents of which are a closely guarded secret. Robert says he keeps a chin-up bar in his classroom and raises himself up and down thousands of times a day as the children pore over their workbooks. He plays self-improvement cassette tapes, which they listen to intently, their foreheads pressed to the table. He assures the children that they can have anything they want and be anything they want to be, and advises them never to take no for an answer.
Principal Duignan’s approach has divided parental opinion. Some of the children have been removed from the school, overwhelmed by the vigorous campaign of aspiration and industry. The remaining pupils, however, revere him completely, absorbing his every platitude with absolute willingness. These children get themselves ready for school, prepare their own lunch boxes, complete their homework without supervision and promptly put themselves to bed. Their parents speak of their approval, and remark on the significant maturity of their children in comparison to others of the same age. After a time, these parents come to a disturbing realisation: their offspring have little need for them at all.
It often feels as though myself and Evelyn were born friends. We’re always on the edge of things and looking on. It’s as though we’re the only people who’re truly alive, and the people around us aren’t real at all, existing merely for our own amusement.
Evelyn has squeaky hair. She rubs her hair with her fingers and you can hear a faint squeak out of it. She says hair isn’t clean unless it’s squeaking. It was hard to get the knack of getting the squeak out of my own hair, but I manage it in the end. I’m very careful to keep my hair clean, as it’s the sort of thing Evelyn would notice as soon as she’d lay eyes on you.
Maeve can’t get a squeak out of her hair. ‘Come here and I’ll give it a go,’ Evelyn says impatiently, and she rubs her index finger and thumb together over Maeve’s hair, but there’s no sound from it. ‘It doesn’t work if your hair is dirty.’
‘It isn’t dirty. I only washed it last night.’
‘Well, there’s no squeak out of it.’ Maeve hasn’t the same kind of hair as Evelyn or myself. She has coarse, dull hair.
‘I had a bath and washed my hair after.’
‘Did you dunk your head in the dirty bathwater?’ Evelyn says, laughing, and I clasp my sides with laughing too. I haven’t always the confidence to be kind to Maeve in Evelyn’s presence. ‘And did Tom and Mary have the bath before you as well? I’d say they did.’
‘They did not. I had a fresh bath,’ says Maeve with a shaking voice. We sit there hooting at her for several minutes, watching her grasp pieces of hair and rub at them furiously. I know that the squeaking hair is only a trick to make ourselves feel superior, but there’s fun to be had in getting a rise out of Maeve. There’s a pecking order, and we know our place in it. It’s Evelyn, then me, and after that it’s Maeve the Mope.
When myself and Evelyn and Maeve happen to meet Aidan and Peadar out on the road, I slip my glasses into my pocket as quick as a wink. I don’t think I’m ready for being seen and admired. I’m thirteen, and I haven’t yet decided if I’m ugly or otherwise, but slipping off the glasses makes me feel like a happy ghost in a hazy world.
When we’re all together, the world revolves around Evelyn, and why wouldn’t it. Her long hair shimmers in the glare of high summer, sun-bleached at the temples. She has new things to wear: a peach sundress and sandals with leather butterflies sewn on the ankle straps. She’s full of herself in the lovely outfit, gaining great pleasure out of her own appearance. I see her glancing down at her sandals, fondling the hem of her dress and repositioning the thin straps over her tanned shoulders. I can almost feel the straps brushing my own shoulders. It must be great being Evelyn. ‘Any of ye see my dad in the paper?’ She’s walking backwards along the bog road, her arms thrust out for balance. ‘
He’s in the courthouse in Adragule. They’ll never get him. The judge is my mother’s second cousin.’ I don’t like Dan Cassidy. He’s only an average-sized man but he seems far bigger than he is. He takes up a whole room when he’s in it, and he changes the feeling of it. Daddy says he sits up at the counter in Donovan’s Bar with his friends and he looks at people sideways when they’re coming in the door. Daddy says there’s always whispering between himself and his friends and you know they’re saying something cruel about the people coming and going.
‘Your father has the roads destroyed,’ Peadar taunts. ‘If he’d any decency at all he’d be going around filling in potholes after himself.’ There’s a bit of resentment for the Cassidy family locally because of the bad roads.
‘I could have your father fired if I wanted,’ she says, slanting her eyes. ‘I could just say the word.’ Peadar and Aidan’s father, Terence Morley, is a trucker. He works for Cassidy Haulage and drives around France, Germany and Spain delivering butter and cheeses.
‘You could in your arse have him fired,’ Peadar says gleefully. ‘How about I’ll bring you a shovel and you can get the job started yourself. We’ve a boiler suit up at the house you can put on. You’d be a fine girl going up and down the road filling up craters.’ Aidan and myself guffaw, while Maeve appears fearful, unsure of how Evelyn will react to the goading. Evelyn comes to a standstill on the road and gives Peadar a hard shove, and he’s only laughing harder at her.
You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here Page 2